The Member of Parliament Josie Farrer, who introduced reform of Western Australia's constitution and the recognition of Indigenous people to Parliament, is driven in part by a brutal childhood injustice.

Josie Farrer danced with her Gidja family at the Kimberley Aboriginal Law and Culture Centre Festival at Jarlmadangah in September 2014. (ABC Local:Ben Collins)

Kimberley MP Josie Farrer spent her first ten years living on her traditional country speaking Gidja and hunting for her food. Then one day a truck pulled up and offered all the kids a ride; it was the brutal beginning to her life in white Australia.

"I was born somewhere in the bush there... I'm a Gidja person, and my people are the Lungga Gidja people."

Although she started attending school on the Moola Bulla pastoral station, Ms Farrer led a largely traditional life.

"Everyday it was all bushtucker. It was what the family caught for the day, whether it was a kangaroo, whether it was an emu, whether it was a goanna, whether it was a bush turkey, whether it was an echidna that they caught at night. Because night time hunting too, is what our people did."

Stolen

While suburban Australians were preoccupied in 1955 with the imminent launch of television in time for the Melbourne Olympics , a world away in the central Kimberley a strange truck made a surprise visit to Ms Farrer's bush camp early one morning

"'Do you kids want to go for a ride?' Of course we'd never been on the back of a vehicle before... It looked like fun I guess."

The truck visited other camps in the area, inviting children to climb onboard.

"Eventually it was full of kids. I think that's when realisation reared its head, and all of a sudden some of the adults got up and realised all their kids were on the back of this truck and didn't know where the truck was taking them."

Ms Farrer wouldn't see her mother for 12 months, and other family members for years after that. The truck was a result of the sale of Moola Bulla station by the state government to private interests. Aboriginal people were moved like unwanted stock.

The children were carted across the rough dirt roads, over the course of days, to a location outside of the small town of Fitzroy Crossing.

"We didn't have any answers. Nobody told us what was going on. No one told us why we were taken there. We were all sitting there crying, we were all huddling together."

It was the beginning of Ms Farrer's life on the newly founded United Aboriginal Mission.

"We were flogged for speaking in our own languages. We were flogged because we didn't understand too much English... It was terrible because there were nights when you couldn't go to sleep, you just didn't know what was happening."

Trauma

Reflecting on the experience as an adult, Ms Farrer regards the experience as a systematic destruction of her culture.

"I look on it as genocide really, because we weren't allowed to live the life we were supposed to live as an Aboriginal kid with your own family."

As well as cultural destruction, Ms Farrer's forced removal impacted the lives of those closest to her.

"By the time my mother and her parents came... My grandfather, he must have been exhausted because they actually found us. With all the trauma that they had faced, it was just too much for him; he didn't wake up one morning."

Ms Farrer's mother never fully recovered from the experience of having her daughter taken without explanation.

"It drove her insane. In today's words they'd probably say that she had a mental breakdown. But they're the sort of things that my mum and her family experienced."

Rising

"For a long time in my life I was very angry... The desire to go back to my country, it was something I could never, ever get back, to this day."

But through the anger about her treatment and the impacts on Aboriginal people, came the drive to make the long climb from the bottom of the culture that had taken so much.

"The knowledge and understanding of who I am and where I come from has given me that power to expose some of the ways we were treated as children."

Her anger over the mistreatment of Aboriginal people prompted a friend who worked for the Electoral Commission to tell Ms Farrer that if she really wanted justice, then she should get involved in politics.

"She said to me, 'If you ever want to go back to your country, you have to stand up and take a fight that's really hard."

Indigenous recognition

Ms Farrer spent years in local government, and then in 2013 she was elected into the state parliament as the Member for Kimberley, following the resignation of Australia's first female Indigenous MP, Carol Martin.

In spite of spending her first two years in Parliament as an opposition backbencher, Ms Farrer was able to introduce a Private Member's Bill in June 2014, proposing to make the historic step of introducing the recognition of Indigenous people as the state's first inhabitants, into the West Australian Constitution.

Although the proposed changes are symbolic, Ms Farrer believes they will go to the heart of a perception she believes is still common in Western Australia, that Aboriginal people are not really people equal to non-Indigenous people.

"It's symbolic, but hopefully it will be a step in the right direction... It shows that we are people, the wider community of Australia accepts us as being people. You know, two arms, two legs, a head and some brain."

While initially indicating he would not support the Bill, Premier Colin Barnett has backed the move since a joint parliamentary committee gave bipartisan support in March 2015. The Premier has said he would like to see the change to the constitution in place for Western Australia Day on June 1, 2015.

Ms Farrer said it's an important step in reconciling the trauma inflicted on Aboriginal people, including her own experience as a child, and the just recognition of Aboriginal people in Western Australia.

"As an Aboriginal person and an adult, I've had to go through life without a lot of things, and a lot of that was denying us our rights to be who we are, and to understand why these changes came about... I'm proud to be an Aboriginal person, I'm proud to belong to this country, and I'm proud that I've been able to uphold my culture."